Some will remember that comedy classic from 1961, “Divorce, Italian Style,” starring Marcello Mastroianni. Unfortunately, 60 years later, we seem to be moving toward, even living through, a far less funny, real-life “Communism, American Style.”
What is “Communism, American Style”? As yet one would think it bears little resemblance to the Soviet kind with its gulags and so forth.
Or does it?
On Oct. 6, the Los Angeles City Council proclaimed, nearly unanimously (11–2), COVID-19 mandates that require proof of vaccination to enter indoor restaurants, movie theaters, salons, shopping centers, and just about every other public indoor space you could think of in the entertainment capital.
Others, with the encouragement of our federal government, will soon be following suit in varying degrees or already have.
Maybe gulags aren’t needed when the entire society is living in one.
This occurred only a couple of days after Merrick Garland, the attorney general of our country—in what Mark Levin described as Stasi-like behavior—announced his jihad, apparently in cahoots with several other governmental education entities, against parents who deigned to criticize school boards for propagandizing their children with critical race theory (son of critical theory, son of Marxism).
Garland called these concerned parents, who are springing up seemingly everywhere, “domestic terrorists.”
It turned out the AG’s own children were, via the “education” company Panorama, profiting mightily off purveying this same inducement of race hatred, while pretending to be an anti-racist, totalitarian so-called theory.
Communism, despite its high-toned, ever-changing, moralistic rhetoric—more precisely thanks to it, when you think about it—is the most evolved system yet for preserving as much money as possible in the hands of elites (translation: communist leadership and their friends).
It’s no accident that Fidel Castro died a billionaire while his people live in squalor. Or that Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, inhabits the opulent imperial redoubt Jade Spring Hill, partly a UNESCO World Heritage Site. (Take a look. Mar-a-Lago may not have seemed all that impressive to him.)
Power to (some of) the People, indeed.
Nevertheless. China, Russia, and, no doubt, Cuba—had he known much about it—were considered too impoverished by Marx to be fecund opportunities for communism, especially then. Pol Pot’s Cambodia would probably have baffled old Karl.
Marx assumed his system would first come to that more modern industrialized state that was prepared for the transition, Germany.
He was wrong about that (at least until East Germany came along, but that was only due to the intervention of the Soviets. Yes, Nazism had elements of Marxism, too.).
Or was he? Perhaps he was just ahead of his time.
